


the ghost in the back room

by coslyons



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Existential angst via ghost boy, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-10-05 19:11:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10315064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coslyons/pseuds/coslyons
Summary: They treat you as though you’re just like them. Alive. Human.Except, you’re not.You’re not so much a boy as a boy-shaped hole; you’re no longer a part of this world, no longer a part of any world.





	

At the start of it all was an end.

That’s a nice way to put it, though.

At the start of it, you’re seventeen years old and you get your face bashed in by your best friend. You end up bleeding out on a forest floor because your best friend is also seventeen, and greedy.

You can feel yourself dying. It feels like a lessening, a fading. You can feel yourself drifting from _is_ to _was_ with every heartbeat throbbing in the ruins of your skull.

There is forest, and then there is nothing.

And then, you blink.

* * *

 

Time as we perceive it is an illusion.

In classical mechanics, time is seen as a fixed and regular background to three dimensional motion, ticking steadily onwards while things happen in the foreground.

It wasn’t until Einstein’s theory of relativity that we realized that this wasn’t quite the case. Time was no longer a fixed and implacable measurement. We began to identify events by four coordinates: its position in space and its time. This lead to a potential conflict. It’s entirely possible to have the same event occur simultaneously in two places. It’s possible for the impossible to occur. The only thing that we can measure things against is the speed of light. Nothing can happen faster than the transfer of information. The universe is expanding and speeding up, and it’s impossible to tell where we fit into this clusterfuck of science that means that nothing and everything is real, and truest thing about it all is that physics is a waste of time.

Ain’t that a bitch.

* * *

 

You still haven’t quite got the hang of time-as-circles (but then, time was always something that messed you up).

It’s trickier than you’d originally assumed, trying to place yourself in the right moment in time. Sometimes you miss a spot. Sometimes you get stuck in the same moment over and over again, in a sickening and bone-crunching loop.

Seventeen years of time-as-lines, all completely wasted now.

Sometimes reality goes around like a scratched record. When the needle hits the scratches, time slips. Skipping from one song to another in an instant. Here one moment, gone the next.

No rewinds. No repeats. The record just keeps spinning on and on, and you try to find your place in the music.

You were never a very good dancer.

* * *

 

You’re in a church or a road, or a church road, when a girl you should know but don’t (or else a girl you do know but shouldn’t yet) asks you your name.

You’re not really sure what to tell her. You’re not really supposed to be here. It’s not your place, not your time. But whose time is it?

In a moment of clarity, you say the answer. “Gansey.”

_Is that all?_

That’s all there is.

* * *

 

“What’s it like?”

Ronan’s question comes from nowhere, after an evening of silence.

You look at him. His face is trying to be blank, but he’s bleeding emotion out into the air around himself. You reply, “What’s what like?”

“Dying.” He tries to say it nonchalantly, like it’s a question out of idle curiosity. You can feel the corners built into it, though.

“Hurts like a motherfucker,” you say with a wry smile.

The ghost of a smile flits across Ronan’s lips. “Yeah I bet.” The smile fades. “What’s it like being dead, though?”

That question stumps you.

You don’t really remember being dead.

You remember dying. You remember blood and pain and the smell of pine needles. You remember Whelk standing over you as you bled and bled and bled. You remember the choking feeling of betrayal.

But somehow, you missed the transition between alive and dead.

One moment, you’re bleeding on a forest floor, and trailing behind the impossible and intoxicating force of Gansey’s will the next.

You somehow get the impression that ‘I don’t know’ is not the kind of answer Ronan is looking for.

There’s no way to describe the state of non-being. You think it's something like forgetting. It’s impossible to be aware you forgot something until you are reminded that there’s supposed to be something there in the first place.

You feel the need to say something, so you say, “It’s a violent absence.”

It’s the truth and it’s not, but it works well enough for Ronan. He relaxes almost imperceptibly, and then nudges you with his shoulder.

“Well,” he says. “I’m glad you’re here with us.” 

* * *

 

“Where do you go when you’re not with us?”

Adam’s bent over a set of homework problems, throwing the question like an afterthought. You can sense the tension in his neck that’s going to hurt him later if he doesn’t sit up soon.

You’ve been expecting this conversation and you haven’t. It’s like this conversation is taking place in your head always and with other people sometimes.

(You suspect you might not exist when you’re not around them, as if you’re only something real when you’re seen by someone else.

You never say that part out loud. Not because you’re afraid it might be a lie, but because you’re afraid it might be true.)

Then you realize you still haven’t answered him. You don’t really have an answer, but Adam’s not really looking for one. He’s looking for a discussion, for theories, and you can give him that at least.

“Do all disappearing things have to go somewhere?”

The Adam of a couple of months ago would have said _yes_ immediately and that would have been the end of it. The Adam of now, though, was an Adam who’d seen and done magic. The rules of the old universe no longer applied.

He pauses, brow wrinkled in consideration.

“Probably,” he says. “If it exists, it has to be somewhere. Otherwise, how could it possibly be real?”

* * *

 

“I’m going to ask for your life back,” Gansey says to you one night out of the blue.

 _You can’t_ , you want to say to him.

There’s a moment of silence with nothing but the crickets chirping outside the glass confines of Monmouth.

“Don’t throw it away,” you finally say. _You deserve it more than I do._

The thing is, you suspect you might not have actually been a good person when you were alive. That’s always a bit rough of a thought to have about yourself, but honestly, how could you have been a good person compared to Gansey.

You were always less of a person than he was, even when you were alive. That’s even more true now.

You can feel yourself decaying, these days. Sometimes you feel like sidewalk chalk being washed away by the rain. With every passing moment, you become less: less defined, less vibrant, less _there_.

You find it hard to remember details about yourself now. The only details that seem to stick are the ones that other people pin to you. You are what others make you to be. You are a confidante, a friend, a person. They treat you as though you’re just like them. Alive. Human.

Except, you’re not.

You’re not so much a boy as a boy-shaped hole; you’re no longer a part of this world, no longer a part of any world. You live in the spaces of other people’s lives. You exist to be seen and to see.

If only one of you gets to live, it’s going to be Gansey.

* * *

 

The little boy is curled into himself on the forest floor. You look for a battered face, but you can’t see anything under the hornet-swollen flesh. The boy is dying.

You’ve been practicing. You know what to say in this moment.

“You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not. And so you will live when you should not.”

The boy’s heart stops.

You lay one hand on the bumpy skin on his still warm face.

“Goodbye. Don’t throw it away.”

And then there is no more  _you_.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this since last December, and it was time to be done with it. 
> 
> In other news, I'm still working on the latest chapter of _even birds fly home_ but it's slow going. Spring break has mostly involved me laying down and relaxing at home.
> 
> Anyway, feel free to chat with me on tumblr @questionabledivinity


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